> >Some names appear obvious in their ethnicity (as most are in
> >gender). Some are suggestive. (DRR has mentioned California. In
> >Hawaii, South America and north west Australia there are also
> >indigenous and "white" people with Japanese names.) Others are not
> >even suggestive.
>
> Those who have one or more remote ancestors but look white or Black
> or indigenous through generations of inter-marriages, almost without
> an exception, fail to keep their Japanese names (certainly not both
> the first names and family names) and seldom identify themselves as
> Japanese-Americans, as being Japanese-American has not been governed
> by the one-drop rule that has shaped Blackness in America for a long
> time.
I think that actually proves my point, but anyway.
> The point that I was making, though, was that white folks tend to
> believe that, even while they take note of others' racial/ethnic
> identities, their being white is invisible to people of color, so
> they tend to get upset if people of color mention it.
Huge overgeneralisations.
> >I dispute that anything I've said suggests anything specific about
> >my biological race.
>
> Race isn't biological
True, but it is concerned with vulgar essentialist notions of people's culture being biologically-determined.
-- it's social identification, i.e. how the
> history of social relations within and among nations has created
> categories, into one or more of which others put you and with one or
> more of which you may deeply or shallowly identify.
Yes, based on limited and possibly misleading data such as skin pigmentation, musical taste, diet, or whether or not one supports the Iraqi resistance.
> To take just one example, I think that it's mostly a white thing to
> see the act of making whiteness visible as an act of "race-baiting."
I never said that. I questioned the relevance of race in the context and said it was insulting to assume that someone's opinions on an extraneous issue were based on their race.
> Exceptions exist -- for instance, there are some Blacks, Asians, and
> others -- mostly richer and more conservative than others of their
> races -- who feel the same way about race as most whites
If you are saying that the standard mode of bourgeois people of colour is to pretend that race is "not an issue, I would disagree. It may be true of people in professional/managerial positions, but there are plenty of examples of ethnic minority entrepreneurs using race as a networking/marketing/political device and/or in rent-seeking from liberal/social-democratic states (c.f./e.g. my recent post on the riot in Sydney).
> But patterns do exist -- enough to make it possible for
> social scientists to identify and explain them, electoral campaign
> experts to exploit them for left-wing or right-wing purposes, etc.
And more fool the left for playing these games, when it does.
regards,
Grant.